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grassroots movements

Women human rights defenders from 19 countries demand an end to the violence and discrimination that continues to put their lives, rights, and indispensable work for justice and equality at risk. Read their recommendations here.

Written by visiting intern Veronica Espaillat, this blog explores how feminists have used safe spaces (albeit under different names) to build trust and create shared agendas among women. Despite extraordinary contextual differences, she finds that variations of feminist safe spaces appear across contexts, changing women's lives for the better.

This booklet spotlights.our extraordinary networks that we have helped build, accompany and sustain. You will learn not only what women confront in hostile contexts, but also how they courageously respond with creative strategies that account for safety and risk and offer alternative solutions that support entire communities

Everywhere at the Human Rights Council (HRC) the catchphrase on everyone’s tongue was “shrinking spaces for civil society”. But what does it mean, really? How are activists grappling with this “shrinking space” in their work? To try and find out a little more, JASS Southern Africa's Maggie Mapondera interviewed activists from as far afield as Mongolia, Brazil and India to learn from their experiences and analysis.

I read Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The Trial of Dedani Kimathi years back when I was still in lower secondary school. The character that sticks with me most since that time is the woman political activist who works to support the liberation movement. She smuggles a gun into the courtroom by storing it in a loaf of bread with its insides removed expertly for that purpose. She is an ordinary market woman but uses her agency as part of the formidable people’s liberation movement to unseat colonialism in Kenya.

FAMM is a network of more than 350 young women from 30 provinces across Indonesia uniting diverse activists across issues. See how a grassroots human rights network emerged in a context of closing space and rising fundamentalism.